The Mac Lawyer : The Mac Lawyer : Ben Stevens : Using Macs In The Practice Of Law

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One question that I get fairly often is how to create a pleading template in Pages.  One of my readers, Thomas K. Brown, emailed me a few months ago and shared his template with me.  I asked Tom to write this Guest Post to explain the steps he used to create this template, which he was kind enough to do.

Tom explained that even though he was a novice Pages user, he was able to create this template in just 30 minutes. He found Pages' design to be intuitive and not overburdened with features 99% of users don't need -- an assessment with which I heartily agree.  Without further adieu, I am pleased to share Tom's Guest Post with you:

Like many jurisdictions, my state has specific rules covering the form of pleadings and other documents filed with the courts.  Nothing too onerous (margins, font size, contents of captions, etc.), but I thought having a generic pleading template standing by would keep me from reinventing the wheel every time I needed to file something.

I've done most of my work in MS Office 2004 - I never did the 2008 upgrade despite the sluggish performance of the old PowerPC code running on my Intel-based MacBook (which has grown decidedly less sexy after the recent "Spotlight on Notebooks" event).  One must give props to Apple for pulling something like Rosetta off in the first place.  When the pokiness of the old Office really started getting to me not long ago, I thought I'd give iWork a shot.  After all, at $79 it's not like a huge risk to take if things didn't work out.  Fortunately, they worked out rather well.

My first task was to do the pleading template.  I could have loaded other documents that I had done previously in Word and work from there.  Pages does a pretty good job with conversions and warns you if it's unsure of anything.  To test how intuitive the application was, though, I thought I'd start from scratch and see how long it took to get the basic document together.  It took about 30 minutes.  Here's what I did, step by step.  For the Pages pros out there I'm sure there are more sophisticated techniques, but for a novice like me this worked, and worked quickly.

1. Margins.  My jurisdiction requires left and top margins of 1.5", which is easy enough. Open the Inspector (the i button in the tool bar, or View -> Show Inspector), and in the Document Inspector (the icon that looks like a blank page at the left), choose the Document tab.  Adjust the margins accordingly.  It's helpful to keep the Inspector open.
2. Heading.  The court must be identified in the heading of any pleading.  I like to define styles to make formatting easier to edit and apply down the road.  Open the Styles Drawer (View -> Show Styles Drawer) and you'll notice there's already a Heading style defined (though likely not formatted as you want).  Type in the court's name and manually format it to your specifications.  In my case, I bold and center the text and switch the font to Times New Roman.  With your cursor still in the line you just typed, hold your mouse over the Heading style in the Styles Drawer.  A little down arrow will appear immediately to the right.  Click it and choose Redefine Style from Selection.  This will allow you to apply an identical style in other areas of the document if needed, and if you ever need to change its format, you need only do it in one place and the updated style will automatically apply to every occurrence.
3. Caption.  Captions in my jurisdiction are the typical two column format with the parties listed on the left and the case number on the right.  I've seen pleadings divided with a single column of colons or right parentheses.  Sometimes I've seen attempts at lines drawn out of pipes (|) and equals (=) making a curious form of ASCII art.  When I see two columns I naturally think of a table. 
   Click Table in the tool bar.  If you've left the Inspector open, it will automatically switch to the table formatting tab.  Uncheck the Header Row box and reduce the number of rows to one and the columns to two.  Next, grab the handle in the middle of the right column and drag it all the way to the right side of the page.  You may have to first click outside of the table and the somewhere inside of the table to get this to appear.  The columns should remain equal widths.
   To make the inverted T style of caption, turn off the borders on the top and left of the left column and the top and right of the right column.  Do this by double clicking inside of the cell, then select the appropriate border in the Cell Borders section in the Inspector and set the style to None.  Do this for each of the four sides you want to remove.  When you're done, it will look like the familiar upside-down T. 
   Inside of each cell you can format the text to suit your needs.  I like to left justify the party names, right justify their posture in the case, and center the "vs.".  I also like to both horizontally and vertically center the case number in the right column.  You'll notice that when you click in a table the formatting options in the tool bar changes.  To vertically center something, use the button with the two arrows pointing from above and below a line.
4. Body.  My pleadings generally have some introductory text and then a list of numbered paragraphs.  Type some text and make it look as you'd like your body text to look, then redefine the Body style as shown above.  For the numbered paragraphs, simply click the list button in the tool bar.  I chose the legal style of course.
5. Signature Block.  Some filings require multiple signatures, such as a Consent Order or Joint Motion for Something-or-other.  Similar to the caption above, I use a table with two columns and two rows but again with the Header Row unchecked.  I format each cell accordingly, and simply use the underline character to draw out a signature line.  I'm sure there's a niftier way of doing this but remember -- this exercise took like 30 minutes for a total Pages newbie.

And that's it.  With no prior experience in Pages I was able to do up a pleading without breaking a sweat.  Like most Apple products, Pages is intuitive and powerful enough for my needs.  And at $79 it's a great deal.  You can download a copy of my sample template by clicking HERE.

Thomas K. Brown is an immigration and family law attorney who practices in Rockville, Maryland.